


And all of the ghouls come out to play

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [27]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: (ish?), Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Dubious Self-Care, Gen, Ghost Jordie Rietveld, Ghost Physics, Ghosts, Nina can talk to ghosts, Paranormal, Post-Book 2: Crooked Kingdom, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Trauma, but I really hope it doesn't mess up the whole fightingverse, i love this concept
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 11:42:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21319621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: "Greed may do your bidding, but death serves no man." Or the one where Jordie is actually haunting Kaz.
Relationships: Hanne Brum/Nina Zenik, Kaz Brekker & Jordie Rietveld, Kaz Brekker & Nina Zenik, Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa, Nina Zenik & Jordie Rietveld, mentions of
Series: Prompted Works [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1366669
Comments: 6
Kudos: 159





	And all of the ghouls come out to play

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Shake It Out" by Florence and the Machine.
> 
> Someone on Tumblr requested a fic where Nina talks to Jordie’s ghost a very long time ago. I finally finished it.
> 
> I am not the first person to write a fic like this, and–if I’m remembering the proposal of one the Grishaverse Big Bang fics correctly–I’m probably not going to be the last. I chose to do this as part of the fightingverse for the sake of canon continuity. In canon Nina doesn’t realize she can hear ghosts until KoS, so this couldn’t take place in CK and these days I can’t write non-AU post-CK fics without them being fightingverse. (For example, I’ve got this idea for a crime/serial killer fic which is fightingverse solely by virtue of taking place post-CK.)
> 
> There are some mild spoilers for KoS.

The Van Eck Mansion was quiet save for the quiet creaks of the house settling. Nina lay in the plush bed of the guest room Jesper and Wylan had insisted was hers, staring at the ceiling. She had stayed in Ketterdam for longer than she had expected to, and she was a little surprised that sometimes it was still difficult to be here. She didn’t want to think about what had happened here when she was seventeen, but sometimes at night she had no choice. She missed Hanne, but her girlfriend had stayed in Ravka to deal with an outbreak of sickness amongst the children in a couple mountain villages. The last time she’d written it had sounded like the crisis was basically over and Hanne had talked about coming to Ketterdam to meet he but that could be weeks.

Unable to spend any more time staring at the ceiling, Nina rolled out of bed and went to get a drink of water. When she pushed her door open she had to squint against the light in the hallway. It was late afternoon. They’d been up all night vandalizing the Church of Barter and had returned near dawn. After sitting in the living room as Ketterdam went nuts over their deed for a few hours, they’d all gone to bed to catch a few hours of sleep.

Once her eyes adjusted, she started down the hall. She only made it a couple steps when she froze in shock.

There was a boy standing in the middle of the hallway with his back to her.

Nina stopped. She had been staying with Jesper and Wylan for a month, but she had never seen this boy before. What was he doing here? Had he snuck inside? If so, how?

“You there!” Nina called. “What are you doing?”

The boy turned around, his expression one of shock. He had a mop of unruly dark hair and a round face. His eyes were coffee-dark and familiar, though Nina couldn’t figure out from where. She figured he was about thirteen, but his expression was too open for anyone from Ketterdam. His clothing was out of place too; it was the sort of practical, homespun clothing farmers wore. The sunlight fell across him in an odd way.

“How did you get in?” Nina repeated moving swiftly down the hallway towards him. “Did someone let you in?”

“You can see me?” the boy asked. He spoke with a heavy Southern Kerch accent.

“Of course, I can see you!” Nina snapped. “You’re not invisible! Are you a member of the Dregs? Do you need to see Kaz?”

“I’m not a member of the Dregs,” the boy said, with surprising force. “And I’m here because I’m always where he is.”

Nina finally reached him and paused. Now she could see what was so odd about the sunlight. It wasn’t hitting the boy at all, just passing straight through his body and hitting the floor. Actually, he was translucent, not quite so much that it was obvious from a distance, but now that she was up close, Nina could see the outline of the hall through him.

“You’re a ghost,” she said.

He grinned, it was a happy child’s smile. “And you can see me.”

Nina pursed her lips, weighing her options. Of course it had been a problem when she’d thought someone had broken in, but this wasn’t any better. Ghosts could have major negative impacts on the places they haunted, especially if they were the vengeful, malevolent sort. She didn’t know how she’d stayed in this house for a month without realizing it was haunted. She’d honed her powers in her time in Fjerda and Ravka and it had been a long time since she’d been in the presence of a spirit without knowing it, especially not one powerful enough to manifest a form and communicate with speech.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“What do you mean by ‘here?’” the ghost said. “I’ve been dead for fourteen years, but I’ve only been in this house on an off for a day or so.”

A day. They’d all convened here to prepare for the plan yesterday with the skeletons of dead Merchant Council members Nina had liberated from their tombs. She cursed under her breath. Stupid. She’d known that skeletons were the most likely to have ghosts attached to them of literally any object. She mustn’t have checked them thoroughly enough. Of course, this boy was too young to be the spirit of any of the merchers themselves, but she’d done her research beforehand and couple of them had been pretty despicable. It was very possible that this boy had been killed by one of them and the trauma had been too great to allow him to pass on even after the mercher died.

Nina took a deep breath and prepared herself. She hated performing exorcisms, especially on the ghosts of the unfairly dead. They always fought the hardest and she always felt guilty for forcing them on. She always tried to remind herself that eternity spent trapped in trauma of death was no kindness, but it didn’t always help.

“At least, I’ve been in this house on and off for a day or so, this time,” the ghost went on, oblivious to what Nina was preparing to do. “I’ve been here before, obviously. Of course, I wasn’t always fully here all the times--sometimes I just float along behind him barely aware--but I’ve definitely been here before.”

Horror surged through Nina’s stomach. For the kind of the thing the ghost was describing to happen he would have to be connected to a living person and following them around. Where had one of them picked up a ghost? Sure, they all lead violent lives but the level of violence and trauma necessary to create a ghost was something else entirely. Even if the ghost had just hooked onto them and abandoned another host that still had a lot of worrying implications about that person’s mental state. Most ghosts attached themselves to physical objects and survived off the remnants of their own trauma. Ghosts attached to the living fed off their own trauma and the pain of their host; that was why they were so powerful.

“Who are you haunting?” she asked. Demanded more like. In her experience, most ghosts weren’t reasonable, especially once you realized what they were. “And for how long?”

She expected a sudden switch into a snarling, angry, vengeful spirit, but the ghost looked confused and a little hurt. “You don’t know me?” he asked. “I’m Jordie Rietveld.”

The name was a little familiar, but Nina couldn’t place from where. “I don’t know that name,” she said.

“Figures; he never talks about me,” Jordie muttered. “I’m Kaz’s brother,” he went on. “I died fourteen years ago.”

“Holy shit,” Nina breathed. Now she knew why the name had sounded familiar. Rietveld was the fake surname they’d used for Colm Fahey during the auction scheme six years ago. Jordie was the name Kaz had accidentally called Jesper during their fight. “Holy  _ shit _ ,” she repeated. There weren’t words for this. Kaz Brekker had always been an enigma, a self-styled demon, but this was something else. Never in all the years she had know Kaz had she even considered that he might be haunted by the undead spirit of his long-dead brother.

“Does he talk to you?” Nina asked.

“No,” Jordie said, sounded disappointed. “He never did.”

That answer didn’t surprise Nina. Kaz Brekker’s mythos was large, varied and built on a thousand seeds of truth. If even one person had ever seen him talk to someone that wasn’t there, Nina was sure there’d be stories about him having invisible familiars or some other nonsense.

“I’m not even ‘around’ most of the time anymore,” Jordie said putting “around” in air quotes, which was such a normal gesture for a living thirteen-year-old it threw Nina off. “I used to be able to hang around and watch everything he did, now I kind of float along most of the time not aware of much. I’m only fully conscious and can talk when he’s really upset or sad.” he paused then added, “Or when he’s thinking about how I died.” He looked up at her. “We were swindled by Pekka Rollins and then we both got firepox,” he told her with a morbid matter-of-factness that no living person could manage. “The body collectors thought we were both dead and threw us on the Reaper’s Barge. Only Kaz wasn’t dead. He swam back to the city using my body as a raft.”

“Oh my-” Nina pressed her fist to her mouth. She’d never put much thought into how Kaz Brekker had become the person he was. She’d always figured his childhood wasn’t pretty, but she figured it was more of the orphan abandoned on the streets of the Barrel to fend for themself variety. This was something completely different. It did explain his hatred of Pekka Rollins, for one thing, and why Jesper had said being carried by one of Nina’s reanimated corpses would set him off when Nina had first returned to Ketterdam.

It also, probably, explained the gloves. When she returned to Ketterdam it hadn’t taken Nina long to notice he didn’t wear them all the time anymore. One time when he’d come over to Jesper and Wylan’s for dinner, he’d taken the gloves off when he’d come in the front door and hadn’t put them on again until he’d been leaving. Even though she wasn’t any more attracted to him than she’d been at seventeen, Nina had found herself staring at those hands the entire time; they were so unexpected. He had very nice hands with long, delicate fingers; pianist’s hands, which was absurd for someone of his reputation. When he’d left Nina had asked Jesper what was up with the lack of gloves.

“He’s not wearing them so much anymore,” Jesper said. “He’s doing a lot better, actually. You can even touch him sometimes, though you should always ask first. If you don’t he’ll probably still stab you.”

“So you died, he had a horribly traumatic experience and you’ve been haunting him ever since,” Nina said, studying Jordie intently.

“I was pretty horrible to him for a long time,” Jordie admitted quietly. “I don’t know how to explain it. He was angry and hurting so I was angry and hurting too and the only person I could take it out on was him.”

As far as Nina had seen, ghosts who haunted living people were much, much rarer than folklore made them out to be, but what Jordie had just described was how such things worked. A ghost was not quite the person they had been in life, especially if they were latched onto another person. The living person’s soul was so much stronger than a ghost’s that they tended to override large parts of the ghost’s personality with their own feelings. These ghosts often began to manifest the person’s most powerful feelings, which never ended well given that violent, all-consuming grief was the only way to bond a living person and a ghost together.

It was actually interesting Jordie was as coherent as he was. If Nina hadn’t been able to literally see through him she could have been convinced he was a living person. She’d never met a ghost who had enough of a grasp on personhood to carry on a conversation this sophisticated. It was very odd.

There was a sound a shuffling inside the room, then footsteps and a cane tapping and the door opened revealing a slightly disheveled Kaz squinting against the light. “Nina?” he asked. “What the hell are you doing out here?” He stripped out of his boots, coat, vest and tie, and his pants and shirt were slightly rumpled; Nina wasn’t at all surprised to realize he slept in his clothes. He was leaning heavily on both his cane and the doorframe, and visibly trying to keep his weight off his bad leg. He was wearing his gloves, which Nina had learned in the last few months was always a bad sign.

“Did I wake you?” she asked. “I’m sorry.”

“No, its fine,” Kaz said. “I wasn’t really asleep. What do you need?”

“What so you can get her killed too?” Jordie asked. Something about his tone of voice had changed, become nastier. “Like you got Aart killed?”

Aart was the child Kees Van Dijk had killed to get Kaz attention mere days before. Inej had claimed Kaz felt guilty about it, and obviously she’d been right. The line of Kaz’s shoulders tightened, but other than that he showed no indication he heard anything. He didn’t even glance in Jordie’s direction. He was good. If Nina hadn’t known a ghost was talking to him she’d never have noticed his tension.

“You were really stupid not to notice he was gone,” Jordie said. “What’s the point in everything that happened to me if you’re just going to fail at looking after the children in your care? Didn’t I prove just how easy it is to muck that up?”

Something about Jordie’s aura had changed now that he was talking to Kaz. He didn’t quite seem thirteen anymore. He hadn’t aged visibly but he seemed older somehow, like he had more authority. It was probably another reaction to Kaz’s presence. Nina would have bet money that Kaz was the younger sibling.

“Kaz,” she said. His attention jerked back to her, though the change was so subtle Nina didn’t think she would have noticed it if she hadn’t been looking for it. “I can’t sleep either. Would you like to have tea with me?”

Jordie snorted derisively. Obviously he wasn’t doing quite so good a job at not being horrible to Kaz than he’d claimed. If this was better, Nina didn’t want to know what worse had been like. It was interesting that he’d managed to be so civil until Kaz got close, though. 

“Tea?” Kaz repeated. It was obvious that he was having a hard time focusing on the mundaneness of her request with the ghost of his brother leering over his shoulder.

Jordie opened his mouth to say something else, but Nina had listened to enough. She felt bad for the boy she’d been talking to before, but if he was going to be like this she didn’t want him around. She moved her hand in a sharp gesture, shoving on Jordie with her powers and vanishing him into a limbo where he wouldn’t have any discernible consciousness. Kaz winced and swayed, gripping the door frame more tightly. He’d probably felt what she’d done in whatever tether connected him and Jordie and that hadn’t even been an exorcism. She wouldn’t dare attempt one of those without Kaz’s permission; if he didn’t have a chance to brace himself it would probably drive him insane.

“Yes, tea,” Nina said. “You look like you need it.”

Kaz sighed. “Fine.” It most likely helped that he didn’t know what she’d just done and had probably interpreted it as a headrush. He stepped aside to allow Nina into the room.

“Sit down,” Nina told him. “And where’s the bell for the maid?”

Kaz made his painful way across the room and sunk into one of the armchairs next to the currently empty fireplace. The fact that he hadn’t argued with her spoke volumes. He did however raise an eyebrow at her second comment. “Do I look like the kind of person who knows how to call a servant, Nina, dear?”

He had a point. Nina had always been awkward with servants too, until she’d had to get used to them while undercover with Hanne in her parents’ house. She poked around the room until she found the bell pull near the bed. The blankets of the bed were rumbled; it was obvious Kaz had been tossing and turning as long as she had.

Once the tea was ordered, Nina crossed the room and settled down in the other armchair. Kaz had propped his bad leg up on a footstool and was resting with his head thrown back and his eyes mostly closed. He was very pale and looked pinched around his mouth and eyes.

“Do you have any painkillers?” Nina asked.

Kaz opened his eyes, straightened a little and visibly tried to look more alert. “I’m fine,” he said.

Nina privately doubted it. His leg had given out when they’d been climbing the steps of the Church of Barter last night and he’d just been hearing his dead brother’s ghost. Jordie had said he was only conscious when Kaz was angry, upset or thinking about how Jordie had died. Nina was willing to bet he was little of all three right now. Kaz was not having a good day.

The maid arrived with the tea and they drank in silence for a while. Eventually Nina pushed one of the little scones towards Kaz. He eyed it with visible distaste. “You should eat something,” she said.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“You still should eat.”

He eyed her, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why are you here, Nina?”

“What do you mean, why am I here?” Nina asked. “We’re having tea. That’s why I’m here.”

“No you’re fussing over me,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re bothering. I’m fine.”

“Really?” Nina asked. “Because I’m not convinced you could make it back to your bed right now.”

Kaz sighed, but didn’t try to get up and prove her wrong, which spoke volumes. “So you were just lying in bed and became so worried about me that you just had to come all the way over here to check on me?” he raised an eyebrow in a way that was meant to imply that this was ridiculous.

“I couldn’t sleep so I was going for a walk,” Nina said.

“And you decided to loiter outside my door until you got my attention?”

Now was the perfect time to tell him what she had seen. She couldn’t just ignore this. Bonds like the one Kaz and Jordie had were dangerous. The fact that Kaz was even as functional as he was pretty concrete evidence for the fact that while his physical health was obviously crashing his mental health was doing alright. Still, things couldn’t be allowed to continue on like this; if they did they could easily come crashing down at the worst possible moment.

“Did Inej tell you about how I can talk to ghosts?” she asked.

“She’s mentioned it a couple times,” Kaz said, obviously wondering how this had any bearing on their previous conversation.

“During my time in Fjerda and Ravka I realized that sometimes ghosts can attach themselves to people and haunt them the way they do in stories,” she said. “I can get rid of these kind of ghosts by performing what’s basically an exorcism, though without all the fancy religious stuff.”

“Very interesting,” Kaz said. He sounded like he was trying not to seem skeptical, but failing miserably.

Too late she remembered that Kaz wasn’t religious or spiritual by any stretch of the imagination. He probably only refrained from questioning her insistence in the existence of literal ghosts out of respect for her. Of course he wouldn’t think he was being haunted by the ghost of his dead brother. He probably thought Jordie was a figment of his imagination, a fiction his subconscious had invented to cope with trauma. That was probably part of the reason he was so functional; he knew not to listen too hard. The fact that absolutely nothing stopped him probably didn’t hurt either.

Now she not only needed to convince him that it was theoretically possible for ghosts to exist and haunt the living, she needed to convince him it was happening to him. She quailed at the thought. Kaz didn’t change his mind about anything very easily and she could only imagine that this would be worse. Maybe she should tell Inej about it first and enlist her help in convincing him.

“Is something wrong, Nina?” Kaz asked. “Why did you bring this up?”

She needed to tell him. She couldn’t tell him.

“Nothing,” she said.  _ Coward _ . “Just musing. I just wanted to know what you thought of the whole thing.”

**Author's Note:**

> I had a better idea of how to end this, but I've forgotten what it was...


End file.
